But there was nothing calm about this. With her ears still covered by Mini's headgear, Jessica13 could hear her heart beating in her chest. The thud-thud of it increased speed as she and the other engineers—playfully labeled bulletfoots—began to head into the bay where their mechs were stored and waiting for them.
It wasn't a long walk but when the tight hallways around them shuddered every five steps or so, it was difficult to stay focused on the task at hand. No one wanted to wait around for the kind of hell that would rain on them if the shockwaves grew worse.
The hangar bay was a tightened section of the bunker that had a hallway leading out toward an elevator that took the mechs to the top. It was otherwise crammed to the hilt with parts, tools, cranes, and most importantly, the mechs they would use. Despite that, it was one of the areas with the highest ceilings since it had to accommodate anything from the eight-foot-tall Minato Jessica13 liked to use to the fourteen-foot-tall Mark VII Guardians that were used either for bunker defense or construction outside when repairs were needed.
Armstrong7 rolled across the hallway to snap orders and maintain contact with the men on the top and still wore his suit with the intention to head up there once everything was in place. He was the kind of CO who liked to be in the thick of things himself and struggled to remain in check once he remembered people actually looked to him for orders.
"Charlie4, get those guns connected," he shouted to one of the other engineers, who peeled away from the group she was in to rush over to the Guardians that were still fitted out for repairs. "Mark3, we need those ammo crates stacked and ready to go—get on it!"
Jessica13 could taste the dryness in her mouth and felt the ticking of the blood vessels around her ears as sweat started to trickle down her spine inside her suit. It triggered a distracting itch she wouldn't be able to reach during the next hour or so.
Red lights continued to flash across the room and made it difficult to focus on what she was supposed to do.
"Bulletfoots, we're sending supplies upstairs," Armstrong7 roared and caught their attention as effectively as if he’d used a grappling hook. "Guardians and Cinders will head up and need all the ammo they can get their hands on. You strap as much as your mech can carry, head up, deliver, and head on back to get more, understood? No leaving crates on the ground. You only come back when you've delivered it to a mech in need!"
He talked fast and had already focused on something else. A couple of the Guardian mechs were already disengaging from their coupler links and shuddered as the hydraulics kicked in to give the pilots control of the fifteen-ton suits of hardened steel and titanium alloy. Every step they took made the whole floor shake as they moved to the elevator. The bulletfoots wouldn't join them, of course. The elevator could only take the size and weight of the two guardians that headed up to reinforce those who were already Topside.
Jessica13 connected the headset to the team's comms as she and the other bulletfoots hurried toward the section that stored the support mechs. Armstrong7 stuck close to them and marched like he was running a drill, but the look on his face was something she didn't remember seeing before.
Not fear, she decided. No, he was angry—pissed that someone had attacked his home. He would make the bastards pay for this.
She had seen the man annoyed before and had even seen him yell at a couple of new additions to the defense of the bunker a few times too. Seeing him like that made the sick feeling in her stomach disappear as suddenly as it had appeared. There was still a twist of anticipation in her gut, but it was almost like the rage radiating from her CO was contagious and seeped into the rest of them.
Gone were the nerves and the instinctive need to panic, run, and hide in a hole until all the bad things went away. This was their home, damn it, and they would destroy the bastards who thought they could come from the Outside and attack it.
Besides, this was unlikely to be a raiding party. Those didn't tend to come packing high explosives. This was an occupation force, it seemed, which was why Armstrong7 was ticked.
"Jessica13!" he snapped and dragged her to a halt as she headed toward her Minato. He didn't say anything and merely pointed her to the nearest mech before he did the same with the other bulletfoots along the line. They were being herded into the mechs closest to them to get in them and out of the bay as quickly as possible.
Then again, it was Armstrong7 who had told her not to enter combat situations in a mech she didn't fully trust since that was a good way to get yourself screwed right out of an advantage—and get shredded where you didn't want anything to go wrong.
It was something he taught regularly to almost every pilot he came across, mostly because he himself was partial to the Mark V Argonaut mech. It was the same General Robotics make as the Guardian but an older model, one that had been developed long before AIs had been used for the design and use of combat mechs.
There was a reason why he liked the older model and its lack of an AI, of course, and it mostly revolved around his dislike of AIs interfering with the function of a combat mech. It wasn't that he didn't approve, per se, but he did feel that the AI
